Justin Cronin’s ‘The Twelve’: Two Worlds and In Between

By Matt Staggs on October 8, 2012

We’re a week out from the release of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, the sequel to his break-out apocalyptic horror novel The Passage. I can’t wait. I have to admit that The Passage took a little while to grown on me, but once it did, it fully colonized my entire system like a virus. I was consumed by it.

In Cronin’s books, scattered colonies of humans struggle to survive in a nightmare world dominated by “Virals”, the vampiric victims of a military-created virus gone pandemic. They’re outnumbered by the pallid, hairless predators that lurk just outside of the light. These things, once human, live in massive colonies united in their thirst for blood and the need to transmit the infection. They’re barely more than animals.

Behind the raging, mindless thirst of the common virals are the Twelve: a dozen powerful vampires, the original carriers of the infection. Each controls his progeny through telepathy, unifying their undifferentiated thirst through a sprawling bloodine of fear and infection.

An outsider to both humanity and the Virals is Amy, a mysterious, ageless girl who is neither vampire nor human who may hold the key to saving what is left of the world.

One of the things that most intrigued me about The Passage was the nature of the virus. It exists, like Amy, in two worlds. It is both of this Earth and beyond it. The virus is initially harvested in a far corner of the world and refined by science, but in its transmission it attains a supernatural quality. The Twelve have psychic powers, and they’re connected to their “children” through the virus. It’s like being to read the mind of anyone with the same cold virus – it’s clearly miraculous.

In the virus one can see a concise explanation of what makes Cronin’s books so compelling: The author has taken the supernatural tropes of vampire fiction (the vampire and its thrall, the vulnerability to sunlight, the mesmeric powers) and melded them chimerically with the fearful science of pandemic disease and military experimentation. Thus, the Virals, and by extension Cronin’s novels, live just within the shadow of plausibility, lurking out of the darkness to snap and claw at our reason.

Look for The Passage on October 16, and catch Cronin live at one of these locations: